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Adriana Puckett

After marrying a rancher, former Los Angeles food snob and vegetarian Ree Drummond found herself in the Oklahama countryside as a ranch wife and mom to four kids, all with big, meat-loving appetites. She set out to “create delicious food - food that would allow me to tickle my cooking fancy, but still make the cowboys’ heart go pitter pat.” Drummond started a food blog called The Pioneer Woman, where she posted step-by-step directions to a number of delicious recipes, starting with “How to Cook a Steak.” Drummond’s mouthwatering recipes, combined with her witty comments and lovely photographs, skyrocketed in popularity, which led to her first book, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl.

When I was in school, we often had to memorize and recite a poem to the class. Some of these poems have stuck with me even as an adult, and I always feel a sense of accomplishment when I can remember one. Memorizing poetry is like a game - you challenge yourself to master the poet’s words and rhythm. Once you do, you are likely to remember it for a long time. One of my kids memorized this short poem from the collection and recited it at dinner the other night when we were having peas:

I eat my peas with honey

I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.
-Anonymous

Yes, we all tried our peas with honey after this...and they do taste funny.

Mary Ann Hoberman, Children’s Poet Laureate from 2008-2010, chose 123 poems to make up Forget-Me-Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart because they are “memorable,” which she points out, has two meanings: “easy to remember” and “worth remembering.” Some are short, like the pea poem above, and some are longer challenges, like Edward Lear’s The Jumblies. There are poems about beasts, families, food, nature, and more. There are poems from famous writers (Roald Dahl), favorite poets (Shel Silverstein), and some I had never heard of. Emberley’s pictures are lively and colorful and make the entire book a pleasure to browse.

Halfway through this spring, during a week of practically living out of our minivan and eating dinners on the run due to a parade of soccer games, drama rehearsals, and tae kwon do practices, I said to myself, “Enough. I want to get off this ride!” I picked up Putting Family First: Successful Strategies for Reclaiming Family Life in a Hurry-Up World, by William Doherty and Barbara Carlson, and devoured it in the next 2 days. Doherty and Carlson first trace the evolution of the overscheduling of today's kids and then provide concrete steps for reclaiming family time. I found myself nodding along to almost every chapter and came away with some great suggestions for how to streamline our outside commitments and reconnect as a family.

Doherty points out there are positive reasons why kids are busier today - like more opportunities to choose from - but also several that are negative, like more intense sports schedules, fear that children will be left behind if they don’t engage from an early age, and parental guilt due to long work schedules. Whatever the reasons, Doherty stresses that the end result is that “the adult world of hypercompetition and marketplace values has invaded the family.” What to do about it? The first step is to slow down and reconnect over family meals, optimally four times a week or more. The second is to reclaim bedtime as a soothing ritual. And the third step is to look critically at the schedule, cut back on outside obligations, and find time to “hang out as a family.”

Did you know that the Cinderella story is one of the world’s oldest fairy tales? The first version can be traced back to ninth-century China and was written about a heroine named Yeh-shen. Today, more than 1500 versions of the tale exist, many with a unique twist. I recently enjoyed what I consider to be the most singular version of Cinderella that I have ever come upon in Cinder by Marissa Meyer.

Cinder Linh is a cyborg – part human, part robot – who knows nothing of her birth parents or history. She is a ward of her evil stepmother, Adri, who relies on Cinder’s extraordinary talent as a mechanic to support the family all the while vilifying Cinder at every opportunity. Together with two stepsisters, Pearl and Peony, they live in technologically advanced, post-World War IV “New Beijing.” Unfortunately, New Beijing is threatened by an airborn plague called letumosis, which strikes at random and has an almost 100% fatality rate.

In The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson, Princess Elisa is sixteen years old and getting married to a man she has never met – King Alejandro from neighboring country Joya d’Arena. Although plump Elisa often feels commonplace and dowdy, she is widely considered singular because she was chosen to bear the Godstone, a once-in-a-century occurrence. The living stone nestled in her navel marks her as God’s chosen one with a special destiny. Elisa has spent her years in Brisadulce living in her older sister’s shadow and studying the Scriptura Sancta in relative peace. Upon leaving, she is about to be thrust into a world of political intrigue and omnipresent danger for which she is ill prepared.

“Simple living is about living your life with a purpose that aligns with your values. It’s about enjoying the things you love and care about and not stressing over the things that don’t matter.”

I love reading about new systems for meal planning, housekeeping, and productivity….but when it comes time to implement them, I often get lost in the details and quickly return to my previous, imperfect system. Organized Simplicity: The Clutter-Free Approach to Intentional Living by Tsh Oxenreider goes beyond the checklists: “…at the foundation of this book is the idea of redefining simplicity…I want to help you find what simple living looks like for you.” Oxenreider does this by gently guiding the reader through several reflective steps, like creating a family mission statement, evaluating your family’s current commitments, and making a plan to get and stay out of debt. Then she provides concrete, action steps for decluttering, cleaning, and organizing your physical space.

While I love the idea of purchasing only organic and sourcing all of our food from local farmers or venues, it simply never seemed like a realistic option for our large family of 6 either in terms of practicality or finances. But it doesn’t require an outpouring from your pocketbook to become appreciative of local and seasonal food. Sometimes, it’s as easy as casting a few seeds into the dirt.

When we planted our first vegetable garden and I tasted my inaugural Brandywine tomato, I was completely hooked. Holding a warm tomato fresh off the vine that tasted like some sort of ambrosia of the gods was life changing. That summer, I ate my way through plates of Brandywine, Costoluto Genovese, and Black Krim tomatoes. I grew ronde de nice and adorable pattypan squashes and learned a million different ways to serve squash. I discovered the amazing varieties of eggplants and made ratatouille with our abundance. I fell in love with the amazing variety of seeds and plants offered by such suppliers as The Seeds of Change, The Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and The Cooks Garden.

Harry and Horsie have a serious problem in Cookiebot!: A Harry and Horsie Adventure, by Katie Van Camp and Lincoln Agnew. Horsie’s stomach is making funny gurrrrrgle sounds, and he really needs a snack. But not just any old snack, like apples or carrots. Harry and Horsie want cookies. Sadly, the cookie jar is way up high, on top of the refrigerator. What’s an enterprising boy and his stuffed horse to do? Why, build a cookiebot of course, who can retrieve the coveted sweets.

Ever since Jacob’s childhood, Grandpa Portman has thrilled him with tales of a beautiful island that provided a safe haven during World War II. On the island was a home for children, populated by a mix of kids with strange abilities. There were even photos to corroborate these fantastical stories – bizarre pictures of a levitating girl, an invisible boy (so all you see is a floating suit), a boy who is a living beehive to a swarm of bees inside of him, and so on. But as he grew older, Jacob came to see these stories as only foolish fairy tales, and asked Grandpa Portman to stop telling them in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.

Now Jacob is sixteen, and a terrible family tragedy has mired him in a miasma of depression and uncontrollable fear. To try and reverse his disintegrating mental state, he decides to look for his grandfather’s mythical island, and travels with his father to a remote island off of the coast of Wales. There he finds the decaying ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – and a lot more that he didn’t anticipate: friendship, danger, love, and the pain of making irrevocable decisions.